The fellowship provides Green with the opportunity to draw on material collected from the United States in a new context and with new equipment; creating a good starting point for further mutual projects, both in South Africa and in the US. He hopes it will offer perspective on how research is conducted in South Africa, provide experience in writing of papers and supervision of students and widen his network of collaboration.

Green has focused his research in marine geology on the morphology and sedimentary building blocks of coastal and shelf systems.

‘The focus is on using old deltas left submerged on the seafloor to reconstruct the rates and magnitudes of sea level rise over the last 18 000 years,’ said Green. These data, when input into computer models, could contribute to understanding how shorelines may change with the rising sea levels predicted to occur in a changing climate. In some cases, the rate of sea level rise was 10 times that predicted in the worst case scenarios envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so these are the times we especially hope to focus on,’ said Green.